triplicate
by sweetwatersong
Summary: One prompt, two paragraphs, three sentences. A collection of Avengers drabbles.


**triplicate**  
rating: pg  
characters: Team, Thor/Jane Foster, Darcy Lewis & Steve Rogers, Clint Barton/Natasha Romanoff (x3)  
warnings: none

summary: One prompt, two paragraphs, three sentences. A collection of Avengers drabbles.

_triplicate_

**Team**

_home is (wherever I'm with you),_ title and quote from Home by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes

I never thought about love when I thought about home. (requested by franztastich)

_Well, you fell on the concrete, nearly broke your ass, and you were bleeding all over the place, and I rushed you out to the hospital, you remember that?_  
_Yes, I do._

No one can be surprised, looking at their pasts, to discover that buildings and bricks mean little to the people who have saved this world. (Some are gone, some are forgotten, and all of them are places they can never return to again.)

The Avengers may be six lost souls, but they are always a little less lost whenever they're together.

**Thor/Jane**

_come back and haunt me,_ title from _The Scientist_ by Coldplay.

There's blood in the water. (requested by franztastich)

She doesn't understand what happened, when everything changed, but the weight of remembered water in her lungs tells her why it ended. Her life, that is.

And yet Thor's here, wherever they are, the broken pieces of his smile coming together with a hope that makes her heart ache when he sees her (sees what is left of her) and Jane suddenly doesn't care about the _how_.

**Darcy & Steve**

_heritage_

Darcy Lewis is related to Bucky. (prompted by 4thdixiechick)

Seventy years and that dark-eyed spark still hits him like a hammer, makes Steve reach for words that he doesn't have because this girl in front of him can only be a stranger. (She's almost like a stranger.)

"Wait, don't tell me, you're Captain Superdude," she says, flashing the same lopsided grin like an echo from a ghost in his memories, and it's all Rogers can do to breathe, breathe, to bless this piece of Barnes that slipped through time in lineages and lines to meet him in the future (where Bucky should have been).

**Clint & Natasha, Clint/Natasha**

_what we hold onto_

Natasha helps Clint get through his first killing of an innocent. (requested by hayleycreagine)

He breathes under the flat of her hand, long and harsh and edging on nauseous, bent around his bow even though it has ended a laughing child's life. There are no words that she can offer him, no advice or comfort or cold hard reason, because Natasha knows what this soldier still hasn't realized: the first innocent life any assassin takes is their own.

Barton chokes, trying to swallow bile and tears, and Romanoff says nothing.

.

_truth isn't all things (to all people)_

Clint was never actually released from Loki's control (requested by anonymous)

They are there, blue-edged and blazing in the mirror of their bathroom, in the shadows of his eyes: _lies, lies, lies_. Clint turns away and looks back at the assassin still sleeping in the rumpled bed, one hand curled against her cheek, vulnerable and trusting and naked in her belief of his innocence.

He tells the Tesseract, _we need her,_ and because it is the truth, because he believes it with all his cold heart and allows no other thought to cross his mind, the Tesseract agrees.

.

_holding court in summer_

Clint/Natasha, her favorite flowers (requested by crazy4orcas)

Natasha threads another dandelion into the daisy chain, hiding a smile at his surprise, and doesn't tell Clint that they are scattered across the world that she has traveled, their bright heads bobbing and welcome in her sight for all that they are weeds, that although mankind tries they are so very hard to kill; that wishes are made upon them, and sometimes they come true.

She doesn't have to tell him anything, in the end; he understands, at least a little, and by the afternoon has made a crown of brilliant yellow flowers to place atop her curls. The dandelion queen and her archer on a soft summer evening, in a quiet city park - a wish made, Natasha thinks, the weight of her circlet gentle on her head, and granted.

_fin_


End file.
